Having so far survived their toughest assignment -- marriage to each other -- two former secret agents from rival nations, Gregorio (Mr. Banderas) and Ingrid (Ms. Gugino), are raising two little aspiring spylets, Carmen (Alexa Vega) and Juni (Daryl Sabara), when the call comes to get back in harness.

A television host named Floop (Mr. Cumming) plans to take over the world with the help of an army of robotized children. Gregorio and Ingrid's mission is to crack Floop's fantastic television world (Play-Doh meets virtual reality) and come away with the miniature brain to be inserted in the android horde.

Carmen and Juni are officially unaware of their parents' prior calling, but their inborn spylike tendencies make them pariahs at school. Back in the field, the rusty Gregorio and Ingrid are quickly undone and made prisoners by Floop. Now their elders' predicament gives the children a reason to slip into black jumpsuits and assume a martial arts position.

James Bond has his Q, deviser of deadly gadgetry. Here a less altruistic character named Izzy Machete (Mr. Trejo) turns out everything from jet aircraft to cameras the size of a pinhead for friend and foe, sometimes both at once.

Luckily Izzy is also Uncle Izzy, Gregorio's long-lost and suddenly sentimental older brother. Transported by Machete plane and submarine, the children storm Floop's mountain redoubt. Robots, two of them clones of Carmen and Juni, grab adults by the throat and scruff of the neck. But then Floop pulls an about-face.

VIOLENCE -- The full repertory of crashes, shootings and assaults, all of it playful, if that's the term, and more comical than threatening.

SEX -- None.

PROFANITY -- ''Shiitake mushroom!'' comes the closest.

For Which Children?

AGES 3-6 -- Many children would enjoy themselves, provided they understood enough of what is happening and maybe even if they didn't. On balance, though, parents might well demur.

AGES 7-12 -- This is Carmen and Juni's age bracket, and they'll have a great time, though older children may want to duck anything with a PG rating.

A story from an ''Archie'' comic book becomes movie bubble gum. In their hometown of Riverdale, Josie (Ms. Cook) and her two garage rock band mates, Melody (Ms. Reid) and Valerie (Ms. Dawson), are playing $20 gigs at bowling alleys and enduring taunts from vicious contemporaries when they are discovered, as they say, by a British manager named Wyatt Frame (Mr. Cumming).

Frame happens to need a group on a contract by the next morning. A day earlier the group he did have, a whiny, best-selling quartet called Du Jour, annoyed him to the extent that he and the pilot bailed out of Du Jour's private jet, leaving the boys to pinwheel through the sky and eventually crash outside a Metallica concert.

Fine and good, but Du Jour was part of a vast conspiracy to sell products to the youth of America through subliminal advertising buried in the group's songs. Corporate America is behind this and so, in the name of a healthy national economy, are a raft of federal officials.

All across the country gangs of Du Jour fans suddenly blurt out things like ''I'm sick of my Reebok sweats; I need Puma sweats.'' Fiona (Ms. Posey), the completely ruthless head of Mega Records and frontwoman for the marketing scheme, tells Frame she doesn't care whom he gets as a replacement group, but it had better be somebody.

The girls are nobodies, but a publicity blitz instantly makes celebrities of Josie and the Pussycats. Then it's time to record their first song, and they aren't bad at all, which is a bonus.

Josie, though, has made her pals agree to be friends first and rock stars second, a policy that is sorely tested during their rocket ride to fame. To quash the group's humble small-town inclinations, Fiona plays Josie against the others. (Don't we need a Rolex?)

VIOLENCE -- Frame murders Du Jour, or tries to, and there is some scuffling, but all of this is out of a comic book and clearly so.

SEX -- A whiff of suggestion now and then, but no sex to speak of.

PROFANITY -- A smattering.

For Which Children?

UNDER AGE 8 -- There's no huge reason why not, but one family's film is another's poison.

AGES 9-12 -- Sure. The girls are good people, and the movie rocks for this age group.

For adult escorts of small viewers, it all passes in a yellow and purple flash. In baronial quarters in lush Greenfield, Professor Hale, a Pokémon scholar, is telling tales of legendary Pocket Monsters (Japanese animation characters who trace their origins back to 1996) to his little daughter, Molly, when an e-mail summons him to an ancient dig.

At the site some cuneiformlike wall writings turn into whirling thinga-mabobs with an eye in the middle and dump the professor down a deep hole from which he will not emerge until the end of the picture. Molly is bereft at the news.

Meanwhile, the spinning objects, which are agents of the unknown, are turning Greenfield and environs into a glass floral arrangement of the kind found at better gift shops. Rescuing the professor and reversing the crystallization falls to Ash, the gritty, can-do Pokémon trainer, his human friends and his menagerie of battle-ready pocket creatures.

But the grief-stricken Molly is controlling reality according to her thoughts and dreams about a reunion with her father. Her yearning in turn empowers the dervishes to create an alternate fantasy world full of perils for Ash, who must deploy his Pokémon fighters against stronger opponents sent against them by the crystal world's trainers. Anyway, it's over in 88 minutes, including the uplifting conclusion.

VIOLENCE -- Every development hinges on all-out combat, dismemberment to incineration, between cuddly little creatures of the kind Pokémon viewers might cuddle up with. ''We battle hard, but we stay friends,'' Ash says. Neat trick. At least the constant fighting is bloodless and unreal.